Introduction to Data Visualization

Making data visualisations: a survival guide. Milestones in the History of Thematic Cartography, Statistical Graphics, and Data Visualization. The 2013 Awards Are Open!
The Art of Data Visualization. David McCandless : « L’interaction est le futur de la datavisualisation »
Guest Post: The Future of Data Visualization. Data is everywhere - and readily accessible The open data movement is finally beginning to have some real impact.

Governments are beginning to open up and give people access to the data they have rights to. Some corporations are realizing they don’t need to keep closed doors on all of their data, especially if they are doing the right thing anyway. The number of places to find open data on the web is growing rapidly, and shows no signs of slowing. A D3 visualization of unemployment in the US from Nathan Yau, data via the BLS. What Exactly Is Visualization?
I love a good visualization.

I’ve always been fascinated by those images that manage to inform and entertain at the same time. From time to time I’ve tried to supply tips and insight to help those interested in creating better visualizations. One morning while researching data visualizations I thought to myself “what really makes up visualization”, is it definable? So I did what most of us do when we’re in search for information; I Googled it. After a few minutes of clicking various links I came across an awesome post from Column Five Media that tries to explain what makes up good visualization that I wanted to share with you.

Some thoughts on visualisation. Can someone please stop the infographic madness?
A few years ago, we started doing info graphics by actually doing a lot of research on data and then working with a great group of guys to create art and visualization.

One of them was good enough to be linked from Apple’s website. Old magazine hands called these infographics, charticles. Wired and the old Red Herring were particularly good at this stuff. (No surprise, because my former editor and goddess of the charticle, Joanna Pearlstein works(worked) for both those publications.)
Information graphics. Information graphics or infographics are graphic visual representations of information, data or knowledge intended to present complex information quickly and clearly.[1][2] They can improve cognition by utilizing graphics to enhance the human visual system’s ability to see patterns and trends.[3][4] The process of creating infographics can be referred to as data visualization, information design, or information architecture.[2] Overview[edit] Infographics have been around for many years and recently the proliferation of a number of easy-to-use, free tools have made the creation of infographics available to a large segment of the population.

Social media sites such as Facebook and Twitter have also allowed for individual infographics to be spread among many people around the world.
Scientists Say Infographics Can Save Morons From Themselves. Really?
It’s a sad fact of our cultural moment that anyone can marshall their own "facts" to support just about any argument or political position imaginable.

(Thanks, Internet.) What’s worse, psychology studies have shown that rebutting factually impoverished arguments with actual facts has precisely the opposite effect one would hope: it actually makes people cling even tighter to their fictions. Is there anything that can cut through this Gordian knot of nonsense?
Statistical graphics. Statistical graphics, also known as graphical techniques, are information graphics in the field of statistics used to visualize quantitative data. Overview[edit] Exploratory data analysis (EDA) relies heavily on such techniques. They can also provide insight into a data set to help with testing assumptions, model selection and regression model validation, estimator selection, relationship identification, factor effect determination, and outlier detection.

In addition, the choice of appropriate statistical graphics can provide a convincing means of communicating the underlying message that is present in the data to others.[1]
Statistical Graphics and more » Blog Archive » Statistical Graphics vs. InfoVis. The current issue of the Statistical Computing and Graphics Newsletter features two invited articles, which both look at the “graphical display of quantitative data” – one from the perspective of statistical graphics, and one from the perspective of information visualization.

Robert Kosara writes from an InfoVis view: Visualization: It’s More than Pictures! Information visualization is a field that has had trouble defining its boundaries, and that consequently is often misunderstood. It doesn’t help that InfoVis, as it is also known, produces pretty pictures that people like to look at and link to or send around. But InfoVis is more than pretty pictures, and it is more than statistical graphics.

Data visualization. Data visualization or data visualisation is viewed by many disciplines as a modern equivalent of visual communication.

It is not owned by any one field, but rather finds interpretation across many (e.g. it is viewed as a modern branch of descriptive statistics by some, but also as a grounded theory development tool by others). It involves the creation and study of the visual representation of data, meaning "information that has been abstracted in some schematic form, including attributes or variables for the units of information".[1] A primary goal of data visualization is to communicate information clearly and efficiently to users via the information graphics selected, such as tables and charts.
Data 2 Wisdom - D.I.K.W.